Elevator Pitch: On March 10th, Indiegogo.com will be the launching pad for a niche board game entitled ‘Superpowerful Bonanza’ – a three-dimensional handmade wood and cardboard board game staring new comic book characters and sculpted to look like a multileveled mini city. The game is meant to be an amalgamation of three popular elements in geek pop-culture: video games, comic books and board games. It’s designed to play like a classic side-scrolling video game in which players gather weapons, health and powers (using game cards) to defeat enemies and eventually the bosses in each of the game’s five levels.

Here is a question for you…

What does a Mexican-American school teacher and ex-marine turned heroic masked vigilante; a fiery-redheaded teenaged mystical heroine from Newfoundland; a tough British-American street cop trying to disband a gang who loves cobras; a Jamaican mercenary sent by his government to hunt down a CEO who dresses like a clown; side-scrolling video games; a three dimensional board game designed to look like a city and a depressed 22-year-old cardboard artist have in common?

If your answer is “WTF – who said what now…” – that would be a valid response. On the surface, those different things really don’t mesh well together. Funny enough though, they’re actually perfectly matched!

My name is Luanga Lue Nuwame (weird name, I know – it’s an African/Jamaican/Canadian thing) and I was that aforementioned depressed 22-year-old back in 1999. I was an angry, misguided and utterly depressed geek-boy who was socially insecure and distraught. Family problems, relationship problems and university problems were driving me to the point of madness. Seriously, I was a broken mess back before the term ‘geek’ equated to populous chic.

A day after my birthday, on March 10th, I had a brainstorm out of nowhere. For whatever reason, I decided to combine three things that brought me the most joy into a single concept. I took my love of comic book superheroes, my enjoyment of classic video games like Double Dragon and the beauty of board games and merged them into a single idea. Using nothing but cardboard, Bristol board, toy cars, toy trees and pencil crayon, I spent six months making a three-dimensional cityscape board game called Superpowerful Bonanza complete with my own line of crudely drawn superheroes.

The completion of that game triggered something within my broken psyche and in less than a day, I was working on my next idea and then the next one and so on for the next 15 years. My passion for creation and invention led to stronger self-esteem, a small business venture and even a You Tube channel. Creativity became by anti-depressant and that single homemade board game started it all!

March 10th, 2014 is exactly 15 years since I created the single greatest design I have ever made. For too long I let Superpowerful Bonanza sit in storage collecting dust while I spent time making everything from novelty trading cards to rotating street fighter lamps and outdoor cardboard Adirondack chairs (I’m being dead serious – watch the videos on the Homemade Game Guru channel).

To be honest, I held off doing anything with my magnum opus out of fear of ruining it or even becoming too much of a perfectionist to complete an upgraded design.

Rational thinking towards my game finally came through in late 2013 after a year of having numerous uplifting conversations with like-minded strangers about mental health and from visiting multiple comic book conventions. Plus, over the years I have learned the ways of Photoshop and I met an amazing artist named Daniel Wong who breathed new life into my original chicken-scratch character drawings. The stars were aligning perfectly and the time is now right to introduce Superpowerful Bonanza to everyone.

So enough of my personal first appearance origin story – what is this game all about?

As mentioned before, Superpowerful Bonanza is a combination of a comic book superhero adventure mixed with the type of game play synonymous with the ol’ Nintendo side-scrolling games – all within the form of a five-level board game. Every edition is made out of wood or cardboard by hand and garnished with toy trees (in honor of the original), secret levels and building balconies that act as playing spaces.

Game play is based on accumulating power, weapon and health cards with each move. Each level plays slightly different and each of the level bosses has their own card deck to destroy players with. Four players can act as the heroes and another player can take the roll of the level bosses.

There is a one-shot comic book and 12-card trading card set included in the campaign that explains the narrative behind the game’s premise.

The objective of the crowdfunding campaign is NOT to raise funds to send the concept overseas and mass-produce the bejesus out of it. I want none of that! Wal Mart is not my friend!

My ambition is to simply purchase adequate tools and a small industrial space so I can enjoy the process of sculpting each and every edition myself. Start with making each exclusive campaign edition and then a new edition for the specialty market in 2015. If I can make a living producing this board game every day myself, you would be looking at a truly happy man.

A crowdfunding campaign is only as good as the perks provided to fuel the ultimate dream. This is why I will be offering everything from a one-shot comic book featuring the first appearance of all the characters (never to be re-printed again) to trading cards, card games, t-shirts and a vinyl figure of one of the more unique secondary bad-guys (really, more of a ‘bad evil log’).

All I can ask is for a chance to garner you attention for five minutes and the rest is up to you. Stop by, say “hello, eh” and prepare for a world full of Superpowerful Bonanza!!

See what you think and I look forward to your support and feedback. Cheers.

PS – as a thank you to Bleeding Cool for posting this and to its readers, if you donate to the campaign from this posting, please leave a note stating you saw this on Bleeding Cool. If the campaign succeeds ($5000 goal reached and surpassed), all Bleeding Cool donors (including the staff at Bleeding Cool) will receive a bonus over-sized trading card that IS NOT part of the $15 perk! AKA – an exclusive card only for Bleeding Cool aficionados!